As expected, Amazon's accelerated page loading does nothing to accelerate page loads. In fact, it slows it down compared to going direct to the servers I'm trying to reach. The numbers are mirrored in my own use of the Kindle Fire. Web pages simply load slower if you have this feature enabled.

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I'm left with a few questions about the cloud-side caching feature of Amazon's Silk browser. Today there are no obvious performance benefits to using the feature and even on AT&T's 3G network I didn't see an advantage. From the perspective of the end user, Silk's "cloud based" caching is not only meaningless, but it's a detriment to the overall user experience.

Surely Amazon must have done this testing internally and chose to launch the Kindle Fire with it anyway. There's a huge advantage from Amazon's perspective to millions of Kindle users browsing with it enabled: data mining. Amazon can learn a lot about the usage patterns of its users by just monitoring Silk requests to AWS servers. In theory Amazon could take this data and further optimize the browsing experience for Silk users. There are far more nefarious explanations as well that I won't dive into here.